Carshalton Beeches Baptist Free Church
Church On A Mission
Contact Details:
Banstead Road
Carshalton Beeches
Surrey, SM5 3NL
Registered Charity - No. 1130318
What About The Workers?
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I guess it started on a Wednesday evening last March.
We were in our “40 Days” small group discussing ‘Fellowship’ and the importance of being committed to our local church. Chapter 17 was asking – are we (passive) attenders or (committed) members of our church? That seemed to touch a nerve with some of us.
What about people in stressful jobs working long hours who have no time to get involved in church work? Were they mere attenders? Wasn’t their job contributing to the purposes of the church? Why did “everyone” assume that supporting church activities was the only way of demonstrating commitment? And if fellowship is “helping you face life’s problems”, how much commitment was there in the church to supporting people facing difficult work problems?
Now, of course, there is a lot of support and affirming going on through housegroups, prayer triplets and other informal networks, so that response was an exaggeration. But I have since talked to other people who are in demanding jobs and it is becoming clear there are a number of needs that people would like to see addressed.
Some people would like more open recognition from the church that they are making a valuable contribution through their work – the church wants to reach out into the community and for workers often the workplace is their community and the main opportunity for witnessing. They would like prayer times and sermons to address some of the real moral/ethical dilemmas that face Christians at work. They would like to be able to use their skills and experience to serve the church. They also would like support going through hard times. The Beeches is brilliant in a crisis, but sometimes people need support when they are pre-crisis - just struggling on, often on their own, and often at a cost to health, family and faith.
How might we meet these needs?
Geoff has recently asked me to become part of the pastoral care team. I would like to focus particularly on providing more support for people in work - getting to know people on an individual basis, linking people with similar issues so they can support each other, and setting up other support systems that would help.
Some initiatives taken by other churches include:
- linking specific prayer partners to people at work. The partner prays for the issues the worker requests each week, and often becomes a valuable confidant into the bargain;
- a regular Saturday morning group where one member of the group shares a current moral/ethical work issue at each meeting – “it has become a place where people in the group, particularly under pressure and in impossible situations, have recovered their vision, their faith and their humanity”;
- setting up a skills inventory for the church leadership to call on when special expertise is required;
- circulating relevant articles;
- holding seminars on subjects that affect people generally (eg, stress at work, the issue of compromise) with an outside expert speaker.
Is this an issue for you? What kind of support would you like from (or that you could offer to) the church? How should we go about setting up initiatives that would meet unmet needs?
Richard M
This article first appeared in the Sep/Oct issue of the Beeches magazine.